Plans for Finishing the Helen Saga

I'm still at work, finishing up the book that will, I hope, bring the Helen "saga" to completion.  (By now everyone who reads these blog-posts knows that I hadn't planned to ever publish the Helen story, because it was (had been, anyway,) almost pure erotica.  But without my consciously trying, I found myself writing decent prose in the Helen files, and my friends urged me to publish it, at least in small chunks.)

About half the way through the saga, Helen becomes a college professor, and her life settles into a sort of groove, where after each adventure, after she has met each interesting new person, she heads back to her nest, her house near the school at which she teaches.

While still a professor, Helen sneaks off and acts in a few movies under an assumed name, and it's that escapade that influences Helen's life quite drastically.  So, if there was a central plot to the Saga, it was this fact, and its fallout, and that's what is being packed into Helen and Sharon Vuehl.  If you're not desperately interested in how Helen's story works out, that enormous episode (Helen and Sharon) should suffice; you could imagine any ending you wish; it's fiction, anyway.

Many of the people Helen meets and become friends with, however, are characters whom I love; and Elly, Janet's daughter, and Tommy (Tomasina), the child of Grandma Elly's old age, both have interesting side-adventures, and I didn't want to lose them.  Let's face it; I tend to publish the stories I find interesting, and not what my readers would find interesting; not because I'm mean, but because . . . I'm not really an author.

OK, it's time for a rant.  A lot of young authors are trying to write what will sell.  They learn how to do this in college, and some of them are very, very good at it.

Now I, too, want my writing to be read, but it is more for the sake of my pride in those depraved characters that I dreamed up (unfortunately, most of them very similar to each other!  Oh, I hope nobody reads this blog-post; many of you readers will possibly be negatively influenced by my confessions here).

Meanwhile, I was weeping as I butchered the parts of the story that had to be inserted in the the Sharon Vuehl segment, and I was weeping as I read the finished product at home, because of all the darlings that I thought I had killed off.  But nay; many of them live in
Helen at the Beach,
Little John Finds a Friend,
Helen and the Flowershop Girl,
Helen vs. Handel's Messiah,
and the one that I had forgotten:  Helen's Eventful Summer.

To get back to my rant: I personally feel that there is a difference between the craftmanship that goes into creating a highly readable book or novel, in contrast to a piece of writing that seems to want to be written, and which is not crafted carefully at all.  Admittedly, many of the most wonderful books that have been written do involve a great deal of crafting, which is so well done that there is no remaining sign of the craftmanship that has gone into it; one forgets about the art.  I can never hope to write such a piece; I go along, reporting the action, trying to polish it at the sentence level, instead of taking charge of the plot lines.  In literature it isn't so bad; in movies, the straining to make a movie more commercial is so . . . not good.  Sometimes you think, They had to kill off character X right there, because they needed the audience to be horrified, before Y happened, and so on.

Well, you're thinking, those are the words of an author who doesn't have the guts to have anyone killed off in her story.

(Actually, I did.  I had Pat Wallace---Lisa Wallace's mother---commit suicide in the back of a bus while returning from a performance of the COO.  Well, she is dead shortly after Helen begins teaching at Westfield, but I don't mention it anywhere;   It is present only in my handwritten manuscripts.  Helen now has all Pat and Lisa's violins.  Pat has a major role only in Helen Backstory: Cindy, Lisa, etc.)  I had too much happening with Helen in that first year at Westfield, and I had to give up something.  I also gave up Helen's first Carols with the Bands of the Armed Forces event, just because Helen had to go out to Woodford in the UK to meet Evelyn (Rain) Woodford's parents.  I also gave up Helen playing in a celebrity tennis tournament in Virginia, with Sophie Cocteau!)

Well, if you're a writer, I herewith give you full permission to kill off anyone you need to, (fictionally, of course) because I really have no business giving people pointers about how to write.  I leave that to the professionals.  Of course, that (killing off characters) makes your story a little more theatrical; stage plays necessarily have small casts, for practical reasons.  In real life, most people have more than a dozen friends, who interact with the person in meaningful and necessary ways.  And author who (unlike me) wants to focus the action on a small cast has to resort to using clever tricks, such as conflating several characters into one.  I suppose amalgamating is a better word.

To get back to the closing book of the series:  I invariably get sidetracked when I start writing, because I feel the need to justify everything.  There are so many women in the Helen story who need to be given a happy ending; they just cannot be allowed to have that ending with Helen.  Helen will be a burden with so many of them; I want Helen and her woman to be independent and comfortable.  I was trying to make Helen and Maryssa independent and comfortable---and they were, I think, before disaster struck.   Maybe I should just have Helen killed off, and save myself a lot of trouble.  As it is, I'm having trouble keeping myself from writing happy endings for people you readers have never even met!  Yes; I'm hopeless.

By the way, I read that the ACLU was pioneering a two-week boycott of Facebook, to protest their complicity in the Russian propaganda onslaught against the Democrats in 2016.  So I'm not visiting Facebook for at least another week.  But nothing happens on Facebook for me, because nobody knows I'm on there.  (I have a personal page, and I'm not visiting that, either.)

Added later:  I just checked on the statistics provided by Google, and realized that there are more visits when I write political commentary on this blog, rather than when I write about my stories!  So what should I do?  Should I only write political commentary, or should I just settle for a half-dozen readers for each post?  I'm going for the latter.

Kay

The Galactic Voyager : The Epilogue

I promised to write a last installment of the Helen story, right after I finished Helen and Sharon Vuehl.  (I'm confused; I keep thinking that everyone knows what episodes I have published, and which I have not, and of course, neither is the case; some of you haven't obtained some of the more dull-sounding episodes that are available, and none  of you have seen the ones that are not  up on Smashwords, so . . .)  So, anyway, I ought to be working like mad, trying to write that epilogue.

Readers who have only read the Music on the Galactic Voyager are probably wondering what I am talking about, because the Voyager story is essentially a "one-of" story.  What you don't know is that there is an entire series of Helen stories, about a musician and professor on Earth, who has various adventures, including starring in a TV series as a musician called Cecilia Yorke.  The Music on the Galactic Voyager  is simply an expansion of the plot of that TV series, replacing Cecilia Yorke with Helen.  Only, in the Music story, Helen does not have amnesia, and never did, so it is not the same person.  OK, that explains to each sort of reader what the relationship between the two Helens is.

Well, I have been working on the conclusion of the earth-bound Helen saga, and it is a lot of work.  I want to take a brief holiday, and work on the Music on the Galactic Voyager  for a few weeks.  I have a few ideas.

I love symmetry and balance, but if I keep looking for symmetry and balance in the storyline, it will take considerably longer, and everyone will be frustrated, so I'm going to just try to make it satisfying in simple ways.  In particular, I want things to work out nicely for poor little Lena, my favorite.

Wishing all my readers a happy holiday season, and lots of lovely music!

Progress Report: How Helen is Coming Along

To recap:

Helen at Ballet Camp was repaired, but I designed the headers to be in green.  Smashwords hates that, apparently, and they refuse to send the book to their premium publishers (Amazon, Kobo, Nook and such places) unless I de-colorize Ballet Camp, which I'm not going to do.  My goodness; what a reason to censor a book!  I understand that they must have standards, but these standards seem rather arbitrary.

I also noticed problems with Lost Years: Helen and Lalitha; I repaired that, which was, in my mind, a serious episode, and it is now uploaded.

I also fixed some problems with Helen on the Run, and it is on-line.  This is one of my favorite episodes; I urge you to read it!  Please, please!

Helen and Sharon, unlike the other Helen and X stories, is not about Helen having an affair with Sharon.  It is about a complex escapade that Helen and Marsha plan, in which Helen impersonates an entirely fictitious actress, Sharon Vuehl, and acts in several movies.  The masquerade is so amazingly successful that Helen has to deal with a whole set of relationships that various people begin with Sharon, not least her costar Sita Maunder, the sister of the aforementioned Lalitha.  While Helen lays the Sharon escapade to rest fairly quickly, the ghost of Sharon keeps popping up to haunt Helen long afterwards.  Only Marsha, Lorna, Maryssa and eventually Sita, know about the masquerade.

Then, after many awful incidents that take place to hurt and injure Helen, she has a relapse of her brain tumor, and loses her memory, which means that she does not recall ever having been Sharon.

Helen and Sharon is the account of all this, in sort of Novel Form, because I despair of actually writing up the Helen story in a nice rounded form.  The Sharon theme is actually the main plot line of the story, so after this sub-project is completed, I'm going to call it quits.  In theory, I can replace the brief descriptions in each chapter of Sharon with the entire text of where it has been taken from, because I'm trying to strip out all the non-Sharon detail from them, because in a Sharon-centric universe, all this other material would seem irrelevant.

I also started work on the completion of the Helen story.  It is called Helen's Concerto.  Some of the most satisfying parts of Helen that I have written have to do with Helen's life while at Westfield, the college where she goes to teach.  (Readers will only know about the school from occasional references in Helen at the Beach, and Helen and the Flowershop Girl.)

One of the most interesting characters that enter the story in those years, the three years preceding Helen's meeting with Maryssa, is Isolde Wells, a very young violinist and multi-talented instrumentalist from England.  Isolde visits the US, and plays several concertos with the Impromptu Ensemble and Chorus.  Of course, Maryssa, the daughter of Diane Brooks, and Sita, the sister of Lalitha, are also major characters.

Well, I wanted to whine about the difficulty of extracting a thread from a larger work, but I'm running out of whining steam.  A lot of the chapters in Sharon are a little dull, because the excitement often comes from minor characters, which I try to remove.  I should say tried to remove, because the book is now complete, and uploaded, and has evidently not made a single sale!  Well, one reason is that the cover is not very sexy, and another reason is that it isn't free!  (With free books, I don't really know whether anyone has actually read it, though it is reported as a sale by Smashwords.  I suppose I could re-price it at $0.99, which is their minimum price.)  I can't do a sexy cover, because I can't afford professional artwork, nor can I afford (yet) digital artistic production equipment!

Kay

Yet another story, and a Reminder!!!

Sophie-the-Legs

 There is a minor thread in the Helen story that begins soon after she starts teaching at Westfield.   She is invited to a reception in Pittsburgh, and a young composer challenges her to premiere a still- to- be- written violin concerto.  Helen agrees, and it amounts to a commission, which is not an uncommon occurrence in the music world.

The concerto is written, and Helen plays it, but I always forget the name of the young composer.  Okay, it's Bill Yves!!!  This is so that I will never forget it again!

Back to the early days at Westfield.

Helen On the Run, I feel, marks the point at which Helen actually stops being a kid, and becomes an adult.  Even after this point, Helen still breaks out in some self-indulgent nonsense, and never totally grows up, even once she has met Marissa, at which point she grows up in some ways, but becomes sort of a baby in other ways.

In any case, the story of how she meets Sophie, the tennis player, and Rain (Evelyn Woodford), the language instructor, about her first semester at Westfield College, is very crowded.  Sophie-The-Legs, as Helen's students call her, is a lovely person, but she does not set herself as a potential love interest, which makes her very attractive, is a fun story, especially because she is a fun person, who is entirely outside the music world, and sees everything as new and fascinating.  This part was a lot of fun to write!  Meanwhile, Rain is an intense person, and that part was fun to write because it was so full of emotion.  I think I will have to cut one or the other of them out, and I can't decide which.  I can make Sophie a minor character, who is not a romantic interest, but (Spoiler alert) Rain continues to be an important character, who brings out certain very ugly aspects of Helen's personality.  I love both girls, and with some work I could feature Sophie in a little episode that doesn't interfere with the plot line.

By the way, don't forget: the two new stories, (Helen on the Run, and Helen and Sharon) are uploaded.

Kay

Helen, in Outline

Once again, let me remind you:  Helen was written years ago, just as escapism for it's author: me.  I kept it carefully hidden, to make it more exciting for myself, but also because I was embarrassed.  The literary value of the scribblings were low (and I'm sure many readers still think it is junk that doesn't deserve to have people looking at it, wondering whether to read it!  It takes all sorts, people.)

Anyway, I started publishing cleaned-up episodes from the story, and at present there are eight episodes from the Helen Saga (as well as a major story in which a Helen Nordstrom character is present, but where the character histories of the two Helens have major discrepancies.)  This is a overview of the entire business, so that you can select which segments will be interesting to you.

Helen, ages 12 - 18
In this period, Helen's mother has died, Helen wins a choir scholarship to "the college", a nameless college in Ohio, but her father is too depressed to take her in for freshman year.  Helen hitch-hikes her way to the school, with Janet and Jason Kolb, and meets Janet's mother, Elly.  Helen is early; the other students have not arrived.  There is an instrument-maker who is setting up an instrument-factory at Helen's college, and Helen is hired to help him.  Meanwhile, Helen helps Janet with a tennis program set up by the parks and recreation people.
The semester begins, Helen joins the choir, the tennis team, and hears recitals by a local chamber music ensemble that plays renaissance instruments: viols, lutes, etc, and is soon absorbed into the local Early Music scene, which is just beginning to blossom.  Helen is also interested in mathematics and computer science, and takes courses in those.
During the Winter Break, Helen is offered a job with a rich woman in Florida, to be a companion, and a tennis partner.  Janet and Jason also love tennis, and the lady invites them over, and pays for Janet to attend a program to train tennis coaches, and Janet qualifies to coach tennis.
Helen gets gradually more involved with Early Instruments through the workshop, and persuades the college to organize an Early Music Festival over the summer break.  The local PBS station gets Helen to give periodic updates about the progress of preparations for the festival, and her face becomes familiar to the regional public TV audience.  That winter, Jason is called up for the Balkan war, and dies on the way to the front.  Janet is pregnant, and the baby is born soon after Janet is widowed, and Helen and Janet decide to bring up the baby--Baby Elly--together.  Coincidentally, Janet's mother Elly (now called Old Elly, or Grandma Elly) also delivers a baby, Tomasina, who was accidentally conceived with Helen's father (it's a long story) and the two girls grow up together.
Helen makes friends with a girl called Cindy over the Internet, and it turns out Cindy has lost her memory, and is actually being kept captive by a prostitution ring.  Helen encourages Cindy to escape, and Cindy comes to live with Helen.  (Backstory: Lisa, Cindy, and the Violin.)  Helen is also there when the daughter of the president of her college has a terrible accident, and helps her until the Ambulance turns up.  The girl is Lisa, and her mother Pat plays violin for the local chamber group.  Pat is grateful to Helen, and lends her a valuable unconverted Baroque violin.  The violin suits Helen so well, that she quickly becomes an excellent violinist.  Cindy's memory returns, and she realizes that she is a violin instructor.  Cindy helps Helen to realize her full potential as a Baroque violinist, and then as a player on the modern (steel-strung) violin.
Helen gets a minor part in Mozart's The Magic Flute, meets a sweet guy, Kurt, a fellow-cast-member, and they decide to become a couple.  Helen begins to get invitations to play the violin repertoire with major orchestras, but over the summer, Helen and Kurt drift apart.
Every chance Helen gets, she is invited down to Florida, and she gets to visit a very special nightclub, where they present nude ballet.  Not all the performances are nude, but every evening, they present a few dances by girls dressed very scantily, or not at all, or only wearing body paint.  Helen falls in love with the daughter of the owner of the establishment, Leila, and Helen is Leila's first love, and they begin a passionate relationship.  Leila has been taught martial arts in her childhood, and one night, (long before Helen and Leila had met) Leila and her mother are threatened knife-point.  Leila fights back, and kills the attacker.  The incident leaves a deep scar on Leila.
The Nightclub features Helen and Leila dancing nude together, and their popularity spreads like wildfire.  The club begins to make a lot of money, and Helen gives her earnings to the rich lady who brought her down to Florida in the first place, Juliana.
Helen's affair with Leila makes Janet very unhappy.  Meanwhile, Helen begins to work for a men's magazine as a photographer, which is how she meets the Baker sisters.  Presently, Leila is also unhappy, and Helen also has a few admirers at school, and by the end of the school year, Helen has numerous lovers, but is deeply unhappy herself.

Helen, ages 19-21
At the beginning of the summer, Janet has decided to travel to North Carolina, where she has met a wonderful guy, a clergyman, with whom she has fallen in love.  She needs to bring baby Elly up with two parents, and Helen does not seem mature enough for the job.  Helen decides to visit Leila in Florida, and repair that relationship.  Two people whom Helen loved dearly, a boy and a girl, both had developed AIDS, and had died, and Helen was barely keeping sane.
A woman called Sandy meets Helen at the bus station, and asks whether Helen would like to help out at an all-girls nude tennis camp in Canada.  Helen is not interested at first, sensing trouble.  But she finally gives in, and joins the camp as a counselor called Pink Orchid.  The camp does really well, the girls really learn a lot of tennis, and Helen is a hero.  Helen has a brief visit with Kurt, but that doesn't work out.  Helen is now far happier than she has been in a long time, and decides to stay in Canada with the camp Nurse.  She drops out of school, and Helen and Nurse lead a life close to nature, growing their own food, hunting in the large tract of forest that Nurse owns, visiting the Native American tribe that lives close to Nurse's property.
Helen finds out that she is pregnant, but Nurse is confident that she can help Helen through the pregnancy.  Women have had babies without hospitals for years, she reminds Helen.  But it is soon clear that Helen is having twins.  Sandy is called in, and Helen discovers that Sandy is really Marsha Moore in disguise.  Marsha Moore is a Hollywood actress.  Marsha flies Helen out to her home in Bel Air, and despite everything, Helen miscarries, and Helen sinks into depression.  Helen and Marsha get involved in an intense and desperate sexual relationship, to try and kick Helen out of her depression, and this works to a limited extent.
Marsha and Nurse confer together, and decide that it doesn't make sense for Helen to live in the wilderness, occasionally assisting at a tennis camp; her destiny is to be a violinist, or an opera singer, or a teacher.  She has to finish college; after that, Helen can decide to drop out of society, if that's what she really wants.  As a first step, they suggest that Helen sign up as a camp leader for a girl's ballet camp in Europe.  Helen likes this idea, and the camp is a resounding success.  (Helen at Ballet Camp)
After Ballet Camp, Helen returns briefly to California, and she and Marsha try to settle down to couple-hood.  But Helen is bored, and Marsha sadly realizes that Helen needs her last year of college to grow up.

Helen, ages 21-32
Helen is readmitted to college, and meets a lovely Indian girl, Lalitha, who is a freshman.  Over the year, the two girls fall in love, but Lalitha's father wants her back home, having heard that his daughter has been behaving inappropriately with a certain American girl.  Helen follows Lalitha to India, where she is unable to prevent Lalitha from marrying a man she has no interest in.  Helen wanders around India for months, and gradually loses her memory, forgets her identity, and spends ten years in a Catholic retreat and farm, and Ashram.  She falls seriously ill, and the sisters take her in to the American consulate, which decides to repatriate the nameless American woman.  Helen has surgery, and a tumor is removed.  She has total amnesia, and Cindy offers to take Helen under her wing, and gets her settled at a farm in California run by an order of Catholic nuns.
Helen does well at the farm, discovers she can play tennis, and works in housing construction, and meets two little girls, Gena and Allie.  But the parents of the little girls are ill, and the mother dies, leaving the kids with Helen, and their father is later found dead.
Meanwhile, Lalitha and her little boy have been living in the US for many years.  Lalitha had called around soon after she had arrived in Maryland, and left messages asking to be informed if anyone heard from Helen.  Eventually she got word, and decides to take a cross-country bus trip, to meet Helen, and see whether she can help Helen recover her memory.
With great difficulty, Lalitha manages to help Helen recall her senior year, and Helen returns to Ohio, and her former professors help her to get accepted to graduate school in Philadelphia.
For a while, Helen and Lalitha are happy.  But the pressure of graduate school, and Helen's libido, are too much, and Lalitha asks to be allowed to leave.  She moves back to Baltimore to join her son and the widow of the missionary who had helped her come to the US.  But things go bad, and Lalitha moves in with a young woman who has been a glamour model, Trish.  Together with Lalitha's young son, they set up a home in a low-rent apartment, and barely make a living working in a store.  Lalitha's girlfriend gets herself pregnant with Lalitha's son's child, the young fellow barely old enough to be the father of the baby.  Lalitha has her work cut out for her, keeping Trish and her son apart.  Helen rescues them, and brings them back to Philadelphia, to work for her in a new instrument workshop she has set up.  Meanwhile, Helen is trying to resist the romantic overtures of Lorna, a high-school senior, who studies at a ballet school.  Lorna is infatuated with Helen, and makes highly inappropriate gestures of affection to Helen, much to the disapproval of Gena.  (Helen and Lalitha: the Lost Years)

Helen, ages 33-36
As it becomes better known that the talented violinist, soprano and conductor Helen Nordstrom is a lesbian, and the mother of two little girls, certain conservative elements start a campaign to have the children removed from Helen's care.  At this time, Helen is living with a well-known model, Michelle Smith.  The case is brought to court, and Helen loses custody.  But the two girls make a daring escape to return to Helen's apartment by foot (with the baby in a stroller), and Michelle advises Helen to take the children and run.  Helen buys an old junk car, and they head west.  On the way, Helen meets Penny O'Brien and her little daughter Erin, and they make their way to southern California, and Helen works odd jobs, and they live hand-to-mouth for a while.  Helen's cousin Marika Johnson learns how to get in touch with Helen, and presently Michelle joins them, and Helen gets construction work, and they are now fairly well off.
Helen has carelessly got herself pregnant again.  She had spent the night with a grad student from Rhode Island, Jeffrey Gibson, and paid the price.  They plan a deception, and tell their neighbors and friends that "Steve" (what Helen was calling herself) has to go help out with looking after the kids of his sister, "Paula".  Helen catches a bus as Steve, goes to Marsha, who helps her transform into "Paula", and a few days later, returns on another bus.  After Helen spends a few weeks as Paula, Michelle is identified by the FBI, and taken into custody.  Helen, Penny and the three children head north in a minivan than a friend helps them to buy, and Marika's younger sister, Heikki, lends them a cottage she owns in a little village outside St Paul.  Both Helen and Penny are given work at Ferguson School, a private boarding school in the village of Ferguson.
The baby is delivered, but Helen is once again spotted by the FBI, and brought before a Federal judge, who sentences Helen to six months in prison.  But the sentence is suspended, because of the many mitigating circumstances.  Penny has cancer, and dies in Ferguson, and now Helen has Gena, 14, Erin, 10, Alison, 2, and Baby James, who was born in Ferguson.  (The plan is to put this material in Helen on the Run:  The Lost Years.)

More in the next installment!

Kay

A New Story in the Works!

You might have forgotten by now, but I have been promising, for more than a year, to finish Helen On the Run: The Lost Years, but have failed to deliver.  It is a great story, and I want to end it well, though at this point a quick summary of what takes place might be all I can manage...

However.

A major story element in the entire Helen saga has not even been touched upon, either in this Blog, or at Smashwords.  It is almost the only real story, with a plot and everything, in the story of Helen, except for, well ... actually there are quite a few stories, such as Helen and the Flowershop Girl, which is a very short story, which is such an unconnected episode that I could easily excise it from the rest of Helen.  Helen and Lalitha is definitely a story, and so will Helen on The Run be.  But this one is important, because it really casts a long shadow on Helen's life, as well as affecting Helen's relationships rather strongly.  In fact, this story and its implications might well be considered to be the central plot of the entire series (thinking of the Helen story as a series, which it isn't yet.)

Temporary Cover

I'm going to call this huge story (presently at around 140,000 words) Helen and Sharon, which ironically refers to only one person:  Sharon is a fictitious character whom Helen masquerades as, in order to do some crazy stuff.  (The stuff is not as crazy as some of you might wish for; there is always an overlay of seriousness in these stories, for which I apologize, and to which I surely owe the limited popularity of the Helen stories!  And also the significant paucity of cats, which must surely disappoint cat lovers.)

Sharon is principally about a movie, which stars a redheaded warrior girl, Merit, and I would dearly love to have Merit on the cover of the book, and I'm tempted to actually create the cover by myself.  I would love to get myself one of these Waco tablets, and see if my minute artistic skills are up to the challenge of creating a storybook cover; who knows?  The smaller image in the cover illustration is the Princess, played by Sita, the younger sister of Lalitha, whom you might remember from Helen and Lalitha.  The central figure is from Wikipedia, which in turn credits the image to Jean-Pol GRANDMONT.  Either Mr. Grandmont created the marble statue and then 'distressed' it, or he took the photograph.

Successful Science Fiction Books about Musical Protagonists

Having written a Science Fiction (SF) story focused on a musician (Music on the Galactic Voyager) I'm naturally curious about how other authors have succeeded in exploring that dimension.  The only two that I know of are Anne McCaffrey, who has written such books in two of her series (the Crystal Singer series, and the Dragons of PERN series), and Marion Zimmer Bradley, who has three entries in her Darkover series (admittedly only two of which have a strong music theme).

Let's take Marion Zimmer Bradley first.  Music sneaks into her stories in minor ways not infrequently, but with Exile's Song, she introduces a female character who takes music very seriously indeed.  In the distant future, Marion Zimmer Bradley (or MZB, as she is called by her fans) envisions a cosmos where mankind has spread widely among the stars, and over the millennia has given rise to numerous unique civilizations on hundreds of planets, each with its unique culture.  There is one entire planet, called University, which is the entire galactic center for higher learning.

MZB's Darkover series centers on the planet Darkover, a planet in the system of a red giant, and the main conceit is that, over time, the inhabitants of Darkover boast an extroardinarily large proportion of people with psy powers.  The psy powers are carefully classified, and satify their own rules, sort of, and the families of psy powered individuals essentially rule the society.  After a particularly traumatic political upheaval, one head of such a family gives up his rights to his domain, (as the properties and lands of these families are called,) and goes off-world, to represent it as its senator in the interplanetary government.  He takes with him his daughter, and his second wife, his first wife having been a casualty of the political upheaval (the so-called Sharrah Rebellion).  The story centers around the little girl, who grows up in an entirely different planets, and then goes off to University (the planet, remember), and becomes a capable musician, with an advanced degree in ethnomusicology, that is the comparative musicology of various cultures.  (Actually, it should be called xenomusicology, because ethnomusicology is, to the best of my knowledge, the musicology of the musical arts of primitive peoples.)

The three books in which this character is the central one are among the last few that MZB wrote.  (Others have been written by MZB collaborating with other co-authors, but these three see the hand of MZB still prominent; in subsequent books, she permits her co-authors to fill out gaps in the stories presented in other books.)  I wondered why MZB left it so late to write a book with a protagonist who was a musician, and I had several theories.  One was that being a musician was merely incidental to the character; she may as well have been a poet, or an artist, or a biologist, but for obvious reasons she (MZB) wanted a discipline that was conducive to interplanetary travel (the musician travels into various planets, recording indigenous music, to be studied back in University), and appropriate for an innocent scholar; as you can imagine, an economist or a political scientist or a historian would make for far too canny a character for the interaction of the character with a particular society to be interesting.  A second theory is that MZB was, herself, a musical person, but did not initially have the expertise she needed to write a book centered around a musicologist, until she happened to discover someone who could help her out.  A third theory is that MZB actually met someone who became the prototype for the character.

The story begins really with this girl, Margaret Alton, accidentally having to revisit her native planet of Darkover, and discovering that she had very strong psy powers, which have to be schooled in order to prevent dangerous situations.  (Many of the Darkover stories take this route, of a character discovering psy powers, and having to go through the routine of how to deal with them, but this story really does a good job with it.)  Unlike other strong Darkover series characters, Margaret Alton has a lot of depth, because having her main interest being music, she is impatient with having to deal with this wholly (to her) unwanted talent for, well, mind-reading, and so forth.

Interestingly enough, MZB actually gives credit to another person for inventing the character of Margaret Alton.  I haven't tried to understand what exactly that means; it could be any number of things.

How successful is the story, and the character?  I would say that Margaret Alton is almost the most successful character this author invented.  She is innocent, but sophisticated, repressed, but MZB arranges for her repression to have been artificial, and it is removed, with interesting consequences.  Even when the repression is removed, and Margaret is able to express herself sexually, there is still great discipline, together with passion, which makes for a very attractive character indeed.  The story takes two volumes to unfold, and, I have to say, story wise it is a little too fantastic.  But you never notice the weakness of the plot; the character of Margaret (or Marguerida, as she is called on Darkover) is fascinating, and carries us with her.

The second author is Anne McCaffrey, who had created several SF series, two of which are the Dragons of PERN series, and the Crystal Singer series.  The latter series centers round the mining of a certain sort of crystal, which has to be sung to; the crystal sings back, and it is harvested.  Seems a little far-fetched to me, but though there is singing, there is really no music in the story.

The PERN series is about a human colony on an Earth-like planet (called PERN), and the settlers find an intriguing native life-form that resembles a miniature version of the dragons of ancient Earth mythology.  They genetically engineer a giant version of these little creatures, supposedly to help deal with a certain biological menace, and over the centuries, a symbiotic relationship develops between the humans and the dragons, even when the society regresses to a medieval level.

One of the most charming stories is that of Menolly, a girl who likes to sing.  In PERN, in the centuries after it has regressed to a Medieval culture, there are harpers, people who provide both music and history, and a sort of education based on an oral tradition. But the harpers are all men, and though Menolly would dearly love to be a harper, it is against the rules.  Menolly, furious at being denied this opportunity, goes off to live in the sea-caves, where she is stunned to rediscover the original little miniature dragons (from which, we know, the giant dragons were actually bred.  That all comes out in other stories).

It is interesting to contrast the character of Menolly with that of Margaret, and the two stories, and even the two series.  The PERN series, most of which is set in the medieval society, reflects the pleasure that McCaffrey has in writing stories within that background.  In contrast, MZB's stories get their energy from the interaction between the culture of Darkover (which is also creeping from a feudal one towards a sort of Renaissance culture) and the interplanetary space culture.  Darkover is a protected planet, which is a special status that forbids contamination of its technology with modern scientific technology and culture, something that the Darkovan leadership thinks is essential for the survival of Darkover.

McCaffrey, too, clearly identifies with the character of Menolly, but she has a much easier time of it, since most of what Menolly does is sing, and play a guitar or a little hand-drum.  In contrast, MZB's heroine Margaret can play almost any instrument, and arrives on Darkover already an expert.  Both women are musical through and through, and love music in all its forms (though Menolly obviously never encounters any music except that of the harpers among whom she lives).  Part of the tragedy of the professional musician in today's world is that they need to work with music so much that eventually they find it almost impossible to get enthusiastic about any music after a few decades of practicing the art.  This is just my observation, and I'm sure musicians will dispute this theory vigorously.

Menolly appears in a handful of the PERN books, and it is difficult to decide whether Menolly was merely an invention for the generation of a book or two, or whether she was the expression of a special interest of the author, Anne McCaffrey.  I'd like to think that both characters were the flowering of ideas the respective authors had been nursing along, until something enabled them to create the two characters; perhaps an expert who could give background, or an encounter with a musician with a particularly striking personality!  Anyway, these several music-related books, and these two musical characters are among the most delightful things in my bookshelf.

Kay, musician wannabe

The Sound of Music

I first saw The Sound of Music (somehow it needs to be in italics!) when I was about 12, during one of the periodic revivals of the movie; perhaps an anniversary.  I loved it to bits; very likely my passionate love of music of a certain sort was born on this occasion.  I loved Julie Andrews---and I still love her, of course!  What a wonderful role model for women who want to transcend the traditional stereotype, without surrendering all the superior attributes of the female sex---and I loved every one of the von Trapp kids, the younger ones more than the older ones, at first, and after later viewings of the movie, all of them, but the girls more than the boys!

The historical context of the movie is certainly important, but not the central value of it.  It was a musical, tenuously descended from the autobiography of Maria von Trapp, who, with her husband and family, settled in Vermont, to the best of my knowledge, and established a ski resort there.  The musical component of the play was derived honestly, because Maria was very much a musician, and was interested in folk music of all lands, and gained entry into the lives of the very reserved von Trapp children through music.

The movie really presented a story that was ultimately different from the true story, and in my mind, initially I imagined that Julie Andrews and the kids were the original protagonists!  As I grew older, and watched the movie on different occasions, I became gradually aware of the technical faults of the movie, and the DVD, and the compact disc, the screenplay and so on.  But none of that could detract from the sheer charm of the actors, especially Julie Andrews, the old-time dry humor of Uncle Max, the kids, who stayed in character even when they were rebellious, the angelic sweetness of the girls, as they looked after each other, and the youngest one Gretl (Kym Karath).

Many who are perfectly well balanced in their outlook inexplicably become cynics when talking about a movie such as The Sound of Music.  "Life is not like that," they say, "and in any case, the invasion of Austria was not like that."  Well, of course it could not have been like that; the production took immense liberties to create not only a profitable family movie (an immensely profitable movie, by all accounts), but a movie to which a principally American audience could easily relate.  I must say, however, that the artistic production created a movie into which a viewer---a young viewer, certainly---could sink herself, and almost believe that she was in Austria, especially Salzburg, where Mozart lived and worked for a time.  Furthermore, we're looking at these events through the eyes of Maria von Trapp, who most certainly overlaid a romantic wrapping on her experiences, as most survivors of those times would have done.  We cannot expect that the movie producers would go out of their way to look for gruesome scenes from those times with which to introduce historical accuracy into a musical play.

The revelation came as a shock to me, that many of my fictional characters were based on characters from the Sound of Music---I'll leave it to you to guess which ones; it is at least not a hard guess that Helen was based in large part on Julie Andrews, though not in terms of her undisciplined approach to love and romance---and the movie was most definitely a jump-off point for all my discoveries and adventures in learning about classical music of that time.

The music of The Sound of Music is wonderful, but I have to confess that, with a few exceptions, its charm is mostly that of nostalgia.  Once I start enumerating the excerpts I love, I suspect they will end up being more than half the songs!  Edelweiss, some have written, was not a folk-song at all, but a song constructed by Richard Rodgers.  I am skeptical, but it certainly is a lovely song!  The Do-Re-Mi song is a brilliant composition, unsurpassed by anything, except maybe 'Getting to know you,' from The King and I, and a few iconic songs like that.  I love the completely silly Lonely Goatherd, and the Farewell Song, none of which I can stand anyone singing but the movie cast.  The Sound of Music opening song, and How do you solve a problem like Maria, I enjoy from a dramatic point of view, though they aren't really wonderful as pure music.  Other songs such as Climb every mountain, and I have confidence, and (Oh god) Somewhere in my youth or childhood (I must have done something good), I can take, or more likely, leave strictly alone.

So this is my homage to this delightful, and increasingly under-appreciated movie, and its wonderfully talented cast of actors.

Kay Hemlock Brown

News and Opinion from Kay

I have very strong views on education, especially music education.  I still keep in touch with some of the colleagues from the places at which I have taught, and it surprises me how concerned they are about education, especially their specific fields.  "Chemistry is being neglected," says a tenured chemistry professor, and "Math is not being taken seriously enough!" exclaims a tenured math professor, and "there's too much emphasis on everything except foreign languages" insists a tenured professor in modern languages.  Am I different because I agree with all of them--to some degree?  Clearly, colleges have now been put in the position of having to give kids a general education, to allow them to function in society.  (Grade school used to do this, but in those years kids are awfully busy being kids.)  This frantic competitiveness when it comes to the various disciplines within a school seems needlessly . . . I don't even know the word for it.  (It's fractious.  I had a brain fart.)  It is as if they have never heard the motto: United we stand, divided we fall!  We must all hang together, to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, or we will certainly be hung out to dry separately.  And who should know better that all subjects and disciplines should be given equal emphasis once those fields are introduced into the curriculum than college professors?  They seem to spend far too much time fretting about the stability of their jobs.

I think the central tragedy in our society today is the conviction that nothing is worth more than money.  We have grown up with people who have been preoccupied with material wealth for years, but somehow it never came to the point where it was all that mattered. Reputation, appearance, appearances (not the same thing), power, education, social standing, the public good, all these things mattered to some degree.  But a recent article about a Virginia economist called James Buchanan traces the roots of the economic and political strategy of the economic elite who mastermind the politics in Washington to this man.  He advocated not just the defeat of the welfare state, but the actual destruction of democracy.  Ayn Rand had a relatively sunny disposition, says the author of this piece, compared to Buchanan.  Reading it, one gets the conviction that Trump is merely a tool.

Well, as long as we're alive, we have to push back, and I have neither the inclination nor the training to contribute to the resistance which must take place.  But an important component to the upbringing of the sort of citizen who has a vision of the kind of world in which diversity and art and culture have a place is the proper education.

Whether we like it or not, our environment is educating our kids to believe that only money matters.  Well, our environment is mostly dominated by businesses.  What do we expect?  Money is the very blood of Business, so if we swim in a sea of business, money is inevitably the source of all energy.  Is this, I wonder, the origin of this panic-stricken urgency that so many on the Christian Right feel to proselytize everyone?  Well,  I have news for them: can't you see how your very evangelists have sold their souls to Mammon?  That is the fact that most makes me want to tear my hair out!  More than Trump, Christianity is a tool for this anti-Democratic cohort to dismantle the political philosophy of this, the longest-surviving constitutional democracy.

These Buchananites (as opposed to ordinary Libertarians, some of whom want extreme freedom in order to serve their fellow-man according to their own impulses--but, I'm convinced, not so these Buchananites) must go through life with the opposite of rose-colored spectacles; everywhere they look, they only see someone out to steal their money.

In Helen vs. Messiah, Marissa lies in bed, broken-hearted at the fact that Helen has retired from the concert stage, and apparently gone into a depressed funk.  Here's an excerpt --not the one I was looking for, which would have better illustrated how Marissa regarded Helen, but this will have to do:

Helen’s miraculous arrival a year and some months ago had made her life less of a disaster than it would have been.  In spite of all the heartbreaking obstacles Helen had been presented with, she had given Maryssa the strength to see the world as a place with possibilities, with kindness and friendship hidden behind its rough, harsh face.

That's the essence of it.  Just as Helen opened Marissa's eyes to see the world without being threatened by it, so education does the same for us.  An infant sees the world as its mother.  Then, as it grows older, and experiences its environment, a time comes--or could come--when all it sees is the rough, harsh face of the world.  If we cannot get beyond that intimidating facade, then we're fair game for those who see their environment--and I'm not talking about woods and streams here; I mean the world outside us--those who see the world as something to be mastered and dominated.  The recent history of the USA has this thread of exploitative domination running through it, and not in a happy way.

Those who aren't in sympathy with the aims of college education, see it as an opportunity for the wrong kind of people to indoctrinate innocent kids.  (If there are any college professors reading this: there are great dangers in trying to fight fire with fire, and indoctrination with indoctrination.)  What you can do is to present the basic interconnectedness of all things as something positive, and the world as something to be embraced and appreciated, rather than a hostile entity that needs to be put in a cage, and exploited for oneself (not even for the benefit of others among one's acquaintances).

That was exhausting to write; a thousand curses upon those who dream up these dreary theories which we must labor to address!  The rough harsh face of the world just looks a lot harsher today.
[more after the break:]

Politics

The policy of taking kids at the border away to hold separately sort of died not with a bang, but a whimper, as far as I can see.

Each time they dream up some executive order to rile up the Democrats (which is really what they're doing, and the Democrats know it, but can't help from reacting) it costs the government millions of dollars.  They're eating up their own financial reserves (thinking about the treasury as 'belonging to' the Republicans, which it may as well, seeing as it isn't money, but anti-money, to borrow an idea from the Physics people), which in turn means that they're adding to the deficit.  This means only one thing: the GOP has filled its pockets symbolically with all it can carry, and is preparing to allow the Democrats to deal with this unprecedented deficit.

If only the people-at-large understood the problems with deficit spending!  The national debt is now so large that the liberals and the Democrats cannot afford any social welfare.  Once the Democrats take Congress (and I'm almost willing to bet that the GOP will actually work in the side of the Democrats, because there's nothing for the GOP in taking Congress, and everything to be gained by seeing a Democrat Congress flounder for two years) all the Democrats can do is raise taxes again, pay down the deficit again, and try to prevent the Trumps from running off to Moscow.  Wait . . . maybe we ought to leave the deficit where it is, and maybe add to it a little.  Hopefully no do-gooders will step up to the plate to solve all the problems with brilliant out-of-the-box thinking . . . There may not be any boxes left, once 2019 rolls around.

Kay H. B.

A New Title for Music Of The Stars

A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled on an idea for a new title to my solitary Science Fiction book.  It had been titled Music of the Stars, which was so non-descriptive it might as well have been Song of the Nightingale.
The new title is:  Music of the Galactic Voyager, which is a little better, but not enormously better.  Here’s the cover:

It hasn’t been changed very much; I’m not as energetic about window-dressing as I used to be!
The story is about actual space travel, as a phenomenon in its own right, and not as a setting for more well, exciting might be the word we want here, adventures.  It is going to take off like a lead balloon in conventional Sci-Fi circles among conventional Sci-Fi readers.  In that genre, I must say, love, and family, and relationships and things that some sorts of people consider mushy are sidelined, so that the politics and the mechanics and other science-fiction-type aspects can come to the forefront.  As for me, romance, and art, and play and curiosity trump all those other things.  One of my favorite fantasy writers is Marion Zimmer Bradley, and her stories are full of the kinds of things that I value highly.  I have read many of her books, if not all, and I love them.  But this story of mine is probably going to be classified as hard science fiction, because the fantasy element is practically absent, and I think that’s the most appropriate description of the story.  Only one person has bought the book, which costs all of two dollars and fifty cents, and I’m only restraining myself from giving it away free because it would be a slap in the face of that noble buyer.

In the story, they discover a planet, which the majority of the Ship leadership think is not suitable for colonization.  But there is a stubborn minority who insists on staying on the planet, which puts serious constraints on the resources of the Voyager.  I finished the story a couple of years ago, only to find, on reading it over, that it had been left in a very unsatisfactory state.  (Okay, yes; I’m rotten to the core, so shoot me.)  I am determined to write what amounts to a new last chapter, which will leave things in a lot better shape, if not perfect shape.  And I will make it free for the one person who has bought the book.  That will take some quite fancy footwork.

Kay H. B.

'Squire': A Keladry Story from Tamora Pierce

I am currently reading this book: Squire, a book in one of the series by Tamora Pierce, set in a place call Tortall.  Ms. Pierce is much loved by young readers, judging from the scores of web pages devoted to her on the Internet, but I must pay my five cents' worth of homage, because I am enjoying the story so much.

Just Google 'Tamora Pierce', and you will learn all you probably wish to know about the author, while doing the same with 'Keladry, Protector of the Small', will give you volumes of detail about the protagonist, Keladry of Mindelan.  Teachers: if you begin to see hordes of young women named 'Keladry', this would be evidence about how much this character--and her creator, Ms. Pierce--is beloved among parents of a certain age.

One thing I must remark on is that Tamora Pierce has the gift of putting words into the mouths of her characters that suit them perfectly.  Of course, without this gift, the author would probably not be widely read; I have read books by some people where this ability is tragically absent.  Tragic not because it is an obstacle to their fame and popularity--some of these authors are top-selling people--but because in my twisted mind, being able to write dialogue that really reveals the character's thinking, and helps us to relate to them via our interaction with people we know, and the things they might say, really makes the story pop out of the printed page.

Pierce's heroine in the first story set in the Tortall Universe was Alanna, a noble girl who aspires to be a knight.  It turns out that there have been other female knights before Alanna, but in this first story, it is as if Alanna is trying something impossible, and Tortall society has taken a conservative turn, and Alanna has to fight like mad.  Pierce gives Alanna an advantage, in that the girl has magic gifts, which she desperately needs in order to battle her magic-wielding adversaries.

A couple of decades later, along comes Keladry, who is as unmagical as she could be, and instead of an advantage, she has a handicap, namely a huge protective instinct, which impels her to take on responsibilities with no regard to how thinly she's going to be spread.  (The illustration shows her holding a baby griffin that inflicts painful bites and scratches on Keladry while she tends it, and while various knights challenge her to trials in the tournaments, which leave her black and blue.)

While Alanna is presented as fighting to be allowed to join the ranks of the forces that have become the exclusive domain of males, Keladry just wants to be qualified to do her thing on her own terms.  In some ways their battles are parallel: they echo the battle in today's world for women to have the same freedoms as men.  But where Alanna became a champion of women in her society, Keladry comes across as someone stubbornly pursuing the right to take on her own low-profile battles to protect every underdog she encounters.  We've all met women of both these types, and neither type is superior to the other.  Many kids of both sexes will probably identify more readily with Keladry's anti-bullying stance--though Alanna faced up to bullies in her time--simply because many of us have met people like Keladry, quiet, unassuming, a little stodgy, and utterly reliable.  We desperately needed Tamora Pierce to give us such a heroine, with just a touch of well-deserved glamour!

A Blog Post for May—Lost In Space

Dear Readers,

It's been some time since I made a post, so here is some news from Hemlock Land!

As I have said, I like to re-read my own fiction, mostly because I get annoyed by the writing of other authors.  Not all of them, mind you; it's just that if I'm annoyed by one of my own stories, I can always go back and fix it, when I have the energy!

I have also found out how to make a paragraph break of less than a line, which I'm going to try out today!  (I don't like full line paragraph breaks.)

Lost in Space:  I just watched the first episode of the new series of Lost in Space on Netflix.  The sets and costumes and special effects are all really wonderful, and there's lots of creativity about how the new series descends from the original children's "Space Family Robinson" idea.  The story is set so far in the future that, according to a principle of science fiction writing established back in the mists of time, the technology of the future (provided it's far enough in the future) may as well be magic to us.

I have a couple of entries in the Science Fiction genre (or SF, as it is fondly called by practitioners of the art, but it seems a little precious to buy a little extra scientific style by just using acronyms gratuitously, as they do in NASA), only one of which is true science fiction, the others being mere fantasy: I'm referring to Music of the Stars.  It's a terrible title, I know, but I just can't think of a better one, other than "Helen in Outer Space", which makes me puke.  Wait . . . I could call it The Galactic Voyager!  Sometimes I am so dense . . .

Note: Music of the Stars was intended to be a story in the setting of science in this century, not super-fantastic, super-futuristic science.  Lost in Space is definitely several centuries in the future, or at least one.  It also (spoiler alert) features a robot that is nothing like the robots we have conceived in the near past, and its design does not appear to have any practical object!  Music of the Stars, at least, never errs on the side of gratuitously exotic features.  In fact, scientifically, we would consider them to be throwbacks to a couple of decades ago!  I began writing it when cellphones were not common, so they do have cellphones, but they're used only for making phone calls!  Anyway, I think it would be boring to write about people who're continually looking at their phones!

Also, the main character is diabetic, an ailment about which I knew very little, and so I did not feature the usual treatments that are used to control the condition.  This makes sense, because the patient was very mildly diabetic, and when the story begins, nobody on board the giant space vessel is diabetic except this one woman, since the others had all been screened for the disorder before being admitted to the project (and she feels horrible when she finds out).  So none of the doctors on board bothered to learn about advanced treatments for diabetes, and did not have the wherewithal to manufacture (synthetic) insulin, for instance, while traveling in space.

Scientific Training:  As a kid, I first started out in what they call today a STEM track, before I switched over to a social science / art / music track, so though I'm not an expert, I actually know a little physics and chemistry.  Some science fiction writers, I believe, have learned their science from reading science fiction.  This encourages them to write fiction where the science tends to be distractingly speculative.  Why not, they probably tell themselves; it may as well be magic!  But science is plenty magical enough anyway; it's the element of reality, of plausibility, that attracts me to this genre.

Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM):  There's a lot of talk and propaganda about there being a severe shortage of college graduates trained in this area.  It is true that for us to compete in technology against the Koreans and the Japanese, and so on, it is important for there to be lots of kids graduating with degrees in exactly these fields.  Especially for disadvantaged kids, it does appear to promise better chances of being hired.  Ideally, an American kid with a degree in computers, for instance, would earn a higher rate of pay than a Chinese kid, for instance, applying for the same job; at least this is what appears to be behind the rhetoric we get from the administration.  But I distrust promises of this sort.

In an ideal technology organization, at the higher level, there would be those who have a broader training.  This is why a lot of companies want to hire managers and coordinators with Liberal Arts degrees, that is, those who have done coursework in languages, writing, history, sociology, yes, and even subjects that seem useless, such as music and theater.  What do you think are the chances that future technology might be relevant to music and the arts--subjects that the ignorant dismiss as merely entertainment?  You tell me.  (The failures of the present administration could be traced to individuals being trained very narrowly; not even in STEM fields, but in business and law, most of them self-taught, in the art of theft and dishonesty.)

Technology in an Isolated System:  On the space vessel in which Music of the Stars is set, The Galactic Voyager, all raw materials are scarce.  The main character, Helen, has done an internship with a maker of musical instruments in her college days.  She recalls having made an instrument a semester.  On the Voyager, of course, it does not make sense to make an infinite number of guitars, for instance, to use and discard.  Everything has to be maintained carefully, repaired as needed, and used for ever.  This is not the American Way.  We're accustomed to buying something new if we need something.  (For the longest time, I didn't have personal transport; I depended on the kindness of my friends for transport everywhere, then depended on public transport, and walked wherever I could.  Then I bought a bicycle, and then a used car . . . you get the picture.  Yes, I was guilty of not supporting American Industry.  Now you know my guilty secret: I refused to burn up the Planet just so I could drive about in style.)  Unfortunately, unlike Helen, I don't know how to make and repair guitars, so if my guitar falls apart, I must either stop playing, or find a replacement.  I found out that even professional instrument repairers are sometimes too impatient with older instruments.

Children:  One way in which my fiction is a little different from the writing of others is that there are lots of kids!  Stars has its quota of kids: I remember seven kids, and a couple more kids in minor roles.

Well, I hope everyone is enjoying a pleasant spring!  Around here, the temperatures have been very variable, and the precipitation has kept us seriously off-balance.  I'm trying to lose weight, because my small circle of friends are all trying to diet, and I decided that I need to as well!

Wishing you a happy Mother's Day,

Kay

The Myers-Briggs classification of this Blog, and A greeting to readers!

My books sell very slowly; I'm lucky I don't depend on my books for a living!

Of my best-selling books, the most popular one is Prisoner! which has occupied the number 1 spot for more than a decade.  (I think.)  I understand; it is very readable, and the characters are simple, and the story is romantic.

Alexandra  and  Music of the Stars are the two most serious efforts, the most substantial books, in terms of number of words, each more than 250,000 words.

Apart from Prisoner!, the books that sell these days are Helen at Ballet Camp, and Helen and the Flower Shop Girl, both of which are essentially short stories (Flower Shop Girl is a short story, and Ballet Camp is a sort of Teen novelle).

I am reading Alexandra for fun at the moment, and it is interesting how the character Ninel arrives in the middle of the story, and sort of takes over!  I do love that character, (as well as little Katie,) and it must reveal something about me, probably that I long for a child, which is a little embarrassing.

In Music of the Stars, too, there is a young person who is very important, namely Lena, who is about 20 years younger than Helen at the beginning of the story, and actually the same age as Helen at the end of the story.

On a completely different tack, I submitted this blog to a website that gives you the Myers-Briggs 4-letter analysis of the author of a blog, and it came up ISFJ.  Here's the full report:

The author of http://k-helen.blogspot.com/ is of the type ISFJ.

The quiet, devoted and sympathetic type. They are especially attuned to the present moment, the details of the task at hand and the people involved. ISFJs usually have an extremely good memory of details of people and situations. They are modest caretakers who do not demand credit or thanks for their efforts.

They tend to be suspicious of future possibilities and trust history more than the future. Their shyness with strangers can lead others to misread them as standoffish. Because they are so such nice and generous people they have to look out not to be taken advantage of. It might be important for them to learn to speak up for themselves.

The Nurturers enjoy safe and harmonic work places with few surprises and clear goals. ISFJs are serious people with a strong work ethic, not inclined to self-indulgence. They believe in being meticulous and thrifty. They work well alone. While they may enjoy taking care of others, they do not enjoy giving orders.

Common satisfying careers: Interior Decorators, Designers, Nurses, Administrators, Dentists, Veterinarian, Social Worker, Biologist, Medical Researcher and Librarian.

Notable ISFJs: Mother Teresa, Jimmy Carter, Prince Charles, Tiger Woods, Halle Berry, Naomi Watts, Kirsten Dunst and C3P0.

Well!  The analysis took less than a second, so I must conclude that they just sampled the most recent blog post.  Still, I confess that I just loved their conclusion, and I only wish it were accurate.  In several of my stories, someone tells a character: you are so good and sweet, your mother must be truly blessed to have a child like you!  And the person replies: why, are (other people you know) particularly mean or cruel?  Unlike my characters, I do know that I have fewer mean tendencies, and I tend to withdraw from a conflict rather than confront it.  The only disconcerting things is that I'm described as serious.  I never realized this; I had always thought of myself as a fun person.

I hope I quickly forget this description of the bucket I have been placed in; as I grow older, I'm becoming less helpful and caring, though I'm even more aware of feelings, especially pain, in others.  If I respond to pain, it should be spontaneously, and not because I wound up as the same Myers-Briggs type as Mother Theresa!

The Blog analysis can cheat in any number of ways; for instance, by counting the number of links, or certain categories of words, they can quickly arrive at conclusions that are mechanically driven, which methods are not available when administering the Multiple Choice test that the real Myers-Briggs analysis uses.  Come to think of it, any multiple-choice test has a mechanical element to it, but some tests are more carefully constructed than others.  For instance, such tests as Which Disney Princess Are You?  or What Salad-Dressing Are You? are just for entertainment, and do not serve any useful purpose, and often aren't even funny.

Kay

Excavation2! Helen Archeology

To continue the previous post about Helen manuscripts I have unearthed:  I have to say that finding them is one thing, but going through them is quite another!

So far I have found several threads (I'll put the number here when I finish counting them):

1. The story of 'Helen's' Early Music Festival, a TV event that Helen was responsible for at the end of her Freshman Year.
2. Helen's involvement with the world-famous tennis coach, Gary.  This story, too, is interwoven with a story of a woman called Inez, from Argentina, who invites Helen to her home, and some tense adventures there; stories of Helen's work as a photographer for a men's magazine; Stories of Helen's appearance as a nude dancer at a unusual nightclub in remote Florida, and her long affair with the star of that troupe, Leila.
3. The details of Helen's meeting with Lisa Wallace.  Lisa is a high-school student, the daughter of the President of Helen's undergraduate college, and of Pat Wallace, who gave Helen her first violin, a priceless 17th-century unconverted violin with a Baroque bow.  This story, too, is interwoven with how Helen met Cindy O'Shaughnessy, and how Helen became a singer of Lyric Opera, through singing in The Magic Flute, and The Marriage of Figaro.  This is also the story of how Helen discovered her mother's family, the Johnsons, including her cousins Ingrid, Marika, and Heikki, who appear off and on in numerous stories, most importantly in Helen On the Run.
4. The story of Janet's brief second marriage to Scott Forrester, a pastor in North Carolina.
5. Helen's encounter with a teenager called Michelle Smith, who appears in Helen On the Run as a grown-up woman.  The two Michelles have rather different personalities, and if I publish the story of the youthful Michelle, (which isn't very interesting), I'll have to rewrite it quite heavily.
6. The story of Helen's Christmas Special a few years later.
7. The details of the account contained in Helen at Ballet Camp.  This story is mixed in with the story of Helen's Tennis Camp in the Canada wilds, in a reserve owned by Sylvia Tedesco (also known as "Nurse", since she is the nurse for the tennis camp, in addition to being the owner),  Helen's year-long stay with Sylvia, Helen's pregnancy with twins, who were subsequently stillborn, and Helen's affair with Marsha Moore, the Hollywood movie star.  (BTW, if you find the name Sylvia familiar, it is also the name of Helen's mother, now dead for about 4 years.)  This is also where Helen meets Dr. Nadia Van Der Wert, who ends up being Helen's academic advisor for a number of years, and is hired together with Helen at her job as a professor, before she gives that up.

I enjoyed re-reading the Lisa Wallace / Cindy O'Shaughnessy story so much, I'm getting it ready to publish it independently.  I decided at one time to number the stories in sequence, but at that time everything before Ballet Camp seemed so giddy and un-salvageable that I numbered Ballet Camp 0, in the Helen sequence.  Helen and Lalitha--The Lost Years comes in at 1, and Helen On the Run--The Lost Years at 2, and so on.  So this "prequel" will have to be given a negative number, or just a name, and the tag Helen BackStory.  So this one would be Helen BackStory--Lisa, Cindy, and the Violin.

Excavation! Helen Archeology

Recently I was forced to go through my stuff and get rid of anything I didn't need desperately.  (It had to do with emptying out a closet, so that some complicated rewiring could be done inside it.  It appears that a lot of wiring in older apartments goes through closets.  Who knew?)

Well, imagine my surprise and delight to discover that one of the boxes contained nothing but the lost Helen manuscripts.  Close to 20 pounds of the stuff; some stapled, others simply loose . . . some written on both sides, and some only on one side; some in two columns!  I have devoted an inordinate amount of time to that piece of fantasy.  You are about to discover some of the seamier aspects of that project.  Some of the sections were carefully numbered, others had been numbered at a later time, as I tried to sequence the thing, so that I could type it into my earliest computer.

I had started writing the story when I was in my teens.  Everything I wanted to do, I made Helen do, for me.  Now, a dozen years later, I am hammered by emotions that come to me as I read various parts of these sheets.  And when I take a packet out to read, it could be from a dozen different places (but all --or most-- chronologically before Helen goes to Ballet Camp).

When I give the back-story to any of the episodes I have put up on Smashwords, I try to remember how Helen met some of the characters that figure in the stories.  One of them, who plays an important role in Helen and Lalitha--The Lost Years, is a former nun called Cindy.

I did remember that (I had created her this way:) she was, in fact, a former nun, that she had been kidnapped and drugged, and suffered total amnesia.  But now I'm reading that she had a rather different personality than I remember today.  Today, I describe Cindy as a long-suffering, quiet, earnest person, who loves Helen, and would do anything for her.  I did remember that she was an excellent figure skater, and a string player (a musician), who actually gets Helen started in violin playing.  But in the manuscripts, she is an eager, vital woman whom they initially think is about 25, but who ends up being significantly older.  And I had written samples of the poetry she had written!  She and Helen had met online, in an old-time Chat Room, and she spoke essentially in poetry, always fearing that she would be interrupted by the fellow who abducted her, and was forcing her to be a prostitute.  The manner in which she gets rescued by Helen is described in detail, and is quite different from how I remembered it, until just a couple of days ago.  I think I must have intended for Helen to someday return to Cindy, because I had given Cindy the characteristics that would enable the little nun and Helen to be suitable foils for each other, according to my teenage wisdom.

Janet is depicted as too much of a rug on which Helen walks heedlessly.  As I was writing about Helen after her College Professor days, her new beloved is Marissa Brooks, who first appears in Helen at the Beach, and---spoiler alert---Marissa has inherited some of Cindy's personality.  Marissa meets Cindy in Helen Versus Handel's Messiah (or maybe she doesn't; I might have cleaned up that story to reduce the number of stray characters for the reader.  There are literally hundreds of characters, mainly because I was writing just to entertain myself, and it was not intended for anyone else's eyes), and the account of that meeting---as seen in the imagination of my adult self---somehow seems really plausible.  But now Cindy is just part of the furniture, a very background character, and she deserves better.

A character called Michelle, a model, is reintroduced in Helen on the Run, an important and long innings in the Helen saga.  I'm still trying to get this one ready to publish; if I take too much longer, nobody will ever read it, I suspect.

I have remembered that I always hated writing verse.  I would supply it when it was necessary, but never voluntarily.  But here, as Cindy and Helen corresponded, both of them did it in verse!  I can't even imagine my mental state that could have led to such a thing.  It isn't very good verse, but it . . . maybe I'll include a little of it, as I get more comfortable about revealing details about myself.

K.